Nominal wages rarely fall – even when there’s high unemployment. Part of the reason is regulation, of course. But even under laissez-faire, employers have to cope with human psychology. Almost all workers think that nominal wages cuts are unfair. And while employers might be tempted to say, “Fairness be damned,” they have to face the fact that hurting worker morale hurts productivity and profits. (See here for lots of supporting evidence). [Broken link fixed.]

So how can the market get back to equilibrium? The simplest solution is to freeze nominal wages and wait for inflation to bring the real wage back to realistic levels. A more proactive solution, though, is to cut benefits, and hope workers don’t mind.

Cutting benefits sounds crafty. But on reflection, it might be even worse than cutting wages. Consider: Most workers’ main benefit is health insurance. If employers curtailed this benefit, would workers find it unfair? I don’t know of any survey research on this point, but I’ll bet that most workers would react viscerally to cuts in health insurance. Higher co-payments? Unfair! Tighter coverage? Unfair! Cheaper plan? Unfair, unfair, unfair!

In past recessions, this was probably a small effect. Back in 1980, health care was only 9.2% of GDP. By 2009, this percentage had nearly doubled to 17.6%. To get a feel for the numbers, consider George Mason. My total Kaiser premium is $1448 per month. If this rises 5% per year, labor costs soar $2700 in just three years. Relative to an econ professors’ salary, that’s not much. But for lower-paid workers, it’s huge. Even if there were a “total pay freeze,” a worker who cost $30k in 2008 would cost 9% more in 2011.

My speculation: The high and rising cost of health insurance, combined with health insurance fairness norms, is a major reason why employment is recovering so slowly. If I’m right, we’ve got a serious problem with no easy solution. As always, though, we should start with the low-hanging fruit: Don’t mandate coverage, don’t punish firms for trying to control costs, and above all, don’t amplify workers’ dysfunctional beliefs about fairness with demagoguery. Sigh.

2 Responses to “Why This Recovery Is Different”

He says don’t mandate coverage. Hawaii has the most stringent mandates. If an employee works at least 20 hours a week the employee must provide care. Their health care costs are among the lowest in the nation and the quality of the care is excellent. Medicare costs are far and away the lowest in the nation in Hawaii. This on an island where costs are generally higher. That is, a doctor wants to buy a house and it’s a lot more expensive in Hawaii. You’d think they’d need to pay a bit more to compensate. Maybe they do. But the costs overall are lower.

Same thing in western Europe. Costs generally are high in western Europe for most things. But health care is mandated and overall costs are much lower. I think Caplan is right that our health care costs are killing us. Not just in hiring. It’s the one item that by itself if fixed (meaning if we adopted EU style care) would solve the deficit problem. The right wing resistance to change here in my view reflects the level at which they are captured by corporate power. Willing to create enormous problems and induce massive suffering in service to corporate power. It’s just ridiculous.

But as I’ve shown before, Europe has historically had a higher unemployment rate. No coincidence (of course today it is lower, but this tends to happen in recessions as Europe has more safeguards – but non-recession economy is the far more common).

Anyway, totally unrelated to the point at hand. In todays economy, as things are how they are, Caplan’s point still stands.